Can we get a change or a fix down the line for what I like the call the greed butterzone?

Sometimes, mostly due to random projects popping up, greed happens. My problem isn't there. Normal uncontrolled scenario: Greed builds up to 5, city starts hating my neighbors and I have to think about saving them or letting them smash the cities. Greed goes up to 7ish, they start hating on my giants too, I then smash the mob, maybe toss a goo ball on the very city in question... BAM zero greed.

My problem isn't with that. My problem is when you start seeing greed creep up, you then either slow it down or stop it via various mechanics, but then end up in the 5ish greed range. You end up in a very frustrating situation, so much so that the 12 warmark dev is almost a joke. City sends out army. If you intervene, defending city gets a mark, attacking city likely is still in the 5 greed zone and sends another army. At this point you can gooball or intervene as much as you like, if you let them win the fights, the attacking/greedy city gets a mark and keeps on potentially wanting to kill it's neighbor. If you intervene, the attacking city tries again and again and again. You can control this with danger in between the two cities, but then the defending city ends up with 5-6 warmarks eventually and then it starts warmongering with just 2-3 greed symbols.

TLDR version, it's a mess. The player fix is either to play that city defending game and deal with the half dozen warmarks very quickly... Or the counter-intuitive fix, being to just let the greedy city get greedier till it becomes angry at your giant and you can swoop the greed in one shot, and with good timing, right after it's done growing from it's latest projects.

It could be a complicated fix like tweaking with the war/chasing after giants numbers... Or just a simpler fix where if a city sends out an army to kill another city and loses, it loses 1 greed face so if greed is no longer growing it won't try sending another army 1-2 mins later. Maybe just have it that muckbombing a city at mid greed makes them want to send an angry mob after you so you can get it over with much like you would deal with very high greed. Don't really care what solution works, just not a fan that the worst state a city can be in is not terrible greed but middle greed.

You're right. I'm aware of this for a longer time, and generally avoid the butter-zone too. Normally, the Greed would drop to a normal zone in a few minutes, but danger seems to stop the greed from falling. I'll take it on the list. Good suggestions btw.

This will be a great change. Right now, if I have a city with 4 Greed I can prevent it from attacking with high Danger - but as soon as I reduce the Danger to enable Greed to go down, the city attacks. So, I'm stuck unless I just decide to let the Greed remain high.

How do you guys feel about separating out the decision to attack a giant from the village's greed? Right now it seems that they always attack a giant once they reach a certain level of greed, no exceptions. Which is unintuitive since that means they only attack in response to the player doing something nice for them. I give a village too many resources and they thank me by attacking me. That doesn't really make sense; if anything giving them too much stuff should make them less likely to attack a giant. Here's what I would suggest: make a hidden value that represents the village's relationship with the giants (or each giant) variables that could affect it might include: any attacks by giants on the village or the resources in its boundary, any lowering of the prosperity of the village (that isn't followed soon after by an increase of prosperity ie. destroying their gold mine shouldn't count, if I did so to replace it with a superior gold mine a few seconds later) intervening against them in a war, high greed, neglect, warmarks (but warmarks gained by victories where the giants attacked the village's enemies should count against rather than for) failure of a project, or more. If a village attacks a giant after something like this that makes sense rather than simply always attacking when their greed gets high enough. I like the idea of humans getting ahead of themselves and challenging the giants, but such attacks should happen for a reason and not just because the giants gave them too much nice stuff.

Our original idea was a bit like that. But then money (or the lack thereof) happened. :( Especially the relationship with the giants would be very interesting to do. HOWEVER :D

The idea of the giants attacking you, is kind of a more deep one. The idea is that the humans get more powerful, more greedy, and feel better about themselves. Kind of like teenagers. They develop there own sense, find out the giants are a natural source of prosperity, and start asking and demanding more from it. If you look well, you can see beggers following the giants to ask them for more and more. If they feel they can't get it through asking, well then they feel it's their god-given right to claim it! It might be by getting it from their neighbors, but also from exploiting the giants.

Think about it. We get eggs from chickens, but we don't build a gratefull relationship with them. Instead, we eat them when they're nice and full grown. Humans are not inherently nice to things that provide them. They're only nice to the ones they feel they can't win from anyways. (Like the police, your boss, or highschool principle). It's a bit of a 'message'' in the game. ;)

EDIT: Of course the world is more complex than that, but it's the main point of focus in the design. The things you suggest can form excellent additions, but I wanted to make sure we could express this idea good enough first.

Oh yes, I understand why the humans attack the giants, I just wish that your relationship with them could affect the formula. That there could be villages where attacking the giants would be unthinkeable, and conversely, villages that dislike you for whatever reason and will attack as soon as they think they are powerful enough to win.

I don't know if this is already the case or not, but it seems to me like the humans should only attack the giants if they've built up a lot of greed and then have made use of everything available to them.

Like, a village with 8-10 greed, but only using half of the resources within its borders shouldn't be ready to attack a giant yet. Instead, this village should be more than ready to go to war with any village that settles to close to them simply to ensure that the territory they haven't expanded to yet remains open for expansion.

Meanwhile, a village with say 4-7 greed, but using 100% of the resources within its borders should be ready to go to war with anyone they feel could provide them with more resources. If they share borders with neighboring villages, they might start here. If not, they might take the war to the giants demanding the giants improve their borders.

Additionally, I think that greed should enhance the expansion rate of a villages borders perhaps. And then that border expansion would sate some of their greed. So a village with 10 greed would expand in half the time as a village with 0 greed, and expanding their borders would relieve maybe 2 or 3 points of greed, etc.